Virtual testing is of the most vital importance to autonomous vehicle development, since the autonomous system itself needs to run through billions of miles of virtual road testing or real road testing to ensure SAE level 5 safety requirements. As road network simulation is an essential part of any virtual testing environment, the ability to create and share billions of miles of road network data becomes ever more critical.

This paper introduces the rationale behind the Open Standards movement for virtual road
simulations, and why standardization is essential to the mobility industry’s collaboration on
developing safe, fully automated, self-driving vehicles.